Striking or hitting a moving ball with a bat is one of the most, if not the most, difficult acts to perform in all of sports. Hitting a moving ball requires tremendous eye hand coordination, particularly when the ball is moving at a great rate of speed. Professional baseball pitchers, for example, often throw a baseball toward the batter at speeds in excess of 100 miles per hour.
Hitters must, therefore, practice a great deal to improve their eye hand coordination and develop a consistent and effective swing. "Batting practice" is an important part of any hitters preparation for competition. Generally, such practice involves a human pitcher who throws or hurls balls in succession to the batter, as would happen in real competition. Accurately and consistently throwing a ball to a batter, however is also a difficult task and inaccurate and/or inconsistent pitches detract significantly from the efficacy of batting practice. Human pitchers also tire meaning that--during the course of batting practice--different individuals need to throw the ball. Batting practice also requires fielders to retrieve the balls struck by the hitter and to return them to the pitcher. If only a limited number of balls are available, batting practice is slowed down and delayed as balls are retrieved and returned to the pitcher.
For many reasons, mechanical devices for throwing or hurling baseballs to a hitter for batting practice have been developed. Balls are fed into the pitching machine--manually or automatically--and the device regularly pitches balls at a predetermined speed and direction. These devices are useful because they dispense with the need for the often inaccurate and inconsistent human pitcher.
However, these machines have many disadvantages and drawbacks. In manually loaded machines, an operator must feed the balls to be pitched one by one into the machine. Even in automatically fed machines the balls, after being struck (or missed) by the batter, must be collected and reloaded into the feed portion of the mechanism. Fielders must be available to retrieve the batted balls which means that it is difficult, if not impossible, for the batter to practice without some assistance, even indoors.
Finally, the pitching machines described above are generally heavy, bulky, cumbersome and difficult to set up.
Hence, devices have been developed which allow the batter to practice hitting by himself without the need for assistance in feeding and retrieving the balls. For example, Parr, in U.S. Pat. No. 3,885,790 discloses a device wherein the ball to be struck is tethered to the end of a rope, which swings in a circular fashion. The device, therefore, presents the batter, who stands at one point on the path of the ball's motion, with a simulated "pitch". This device dispenses not only with the need for a human pitcher, but dispenses with the need for fielders to retrieve and reload the pitching machine.
However, such devices, including Parr, have numerous disadvantages. Most devices are mechanically complicated, making the device expensive to manufacture and impractical to use. Other devices are large and bulky making them difficult to set up, particularly by one person.
Other machines have unduly complex adjustments, or cannot be adjusted with any degree of ease. Therefore, it is difficult for batters of different height, size and/or skill level to use the machines, which--in order to be effective--must be adjustable depending on the batter involved. Some machines do not reset quickly, meaning that once the ball is struck by the batter, there is a long delay before the machine is reset and the ball returns to the predetermined circular path. Other machines are prone to mechanical failure, because they are poorly designed to handle the forces placed upon them during use.
My invention discloses a well designed, completely adjustable, relatively lightweight pitching machine. The batter is regularly presented with a simulated pitch and the machine resets quickly once the ball has been struck. The device is durable and it is easy to set up and transport.